Experimental Investigations on the Improvement of an Air Conditioning System with a Nanofluid-Based Intercooler

Abstract

The present work is aimed to reduce the compressor load in a domestic air conditioning system, by introducing a shell-and-coil type heat exchanger as an intercooler. The intercooler uses initially a binary mixture of ethylene glycol:water at 30:70 ratio as a shell-side base fluid and later uses nanofluids with Al2O3 nanoparticles of different volume concentrations. The coefficient of performance (COP) of the system was estimated at different shell-side fluid flow rates of 1, 1.5 and 2 LPM. COP was found to increase with the decrease in the refrigerant temperature at the compressor inlet, due to the reduction in the compressor work input. A highest increment in the COP of around 31 % was observed for the base fluid and 49.32 % was observed for the 0.75 % nanofluid with a flow rate of 2 LPM compared with the case without intercooler. An appreciable reduction in power consumption of 12.24 % was also observed.